Sepp Blatter, Dominque Strauss-Kahn, and Jacques Rogge -- the heads of FIFA, the IMF, and International Olympic Committee -- come from three different countries (Switzerland, France, and Belgium), so I suppose I shouldn't dump them into the same laundry basket, but, I do. They're old, jowly white men with slick hair (fact); they come from (at least partially) French-speaking countries (fact), and they're in charge of major international organizations (fact). And they apparently can get away with doing whatever the fuck they want (opinion).
The first two have tried their luck getting into scandals, with varying degrees of success. Sepp Blatter may or may not have been involved in a bribery scandal to sell their World Cup to oil barons (Qatar). As of yet, the allegations haven't worked their way through the system. Unfortunately, "the system" (FIFA) is the same corrupt, dank netherworld that created the corruption in the first place (FIFA). They hired Kissinger to help them deal with the allegations. Yes, yes, I see. Hiring Kissinger to help your organization improve transparency is like hiring Caligula to help you enforce a government austerity program.
Dominique Strauss has had the misfortune of committing his alleged misdeeds in a jurisdiction where his name doesn't carry sovereign immunity. But he's living in high luxury while on house arrest, so things are ok for the time being. I don't pretend to have any insight into what happened with the maid in NYC, and I won't condemn him for rape just yet. But it is a catastrophic hypocrisy for the international monetary fund, the organization dedicated to enforcing austerity programs on the world's most direly indebted nations, to be living his lifestyle. It sends a compelling "fuck-you-lowly-pig-take-and-like-it" message that can only end badly.
These narrow rants aside, the exploits of these two doodlefucks raises a more important question: how come the Frenchies (or, perhaps more accurately, Western Europeans) are in charge of all the international agencies? France, Switzerland, and Belgium, adjoining nations, have less than 1/35th of the world's population, but they manage to control all the major international governing bodies. Surely, there are at least a handful of smart folks available from South America, Africa, North America, India, Japan, or China capable of managing these posts. But their names don't appear on the lists of candidates.
As someone who is gleefully unaware of how international politics works, this strikes me as confusing. Western European nations, despite (or perhaps because of) a millennium of imperial dominance, have managed to sweet-talk the smaller nations into supporting their candidacies against those of candidates from other nations, large and small. Other powers, such as the US, Japan, and China, are failing at building effective voting blocks to get the votes. So are smaller countries. I don't know why. But I know that oligarchies tend toward corruption, stagnation, and insularity, and that's what I think we're seeing out of these jowly old clowns.
